Thursday, August 10, 2017

Not falling for it

Briahna Joy Gray has a piece at Current Affairs:Having an “identity politics” is
incredibly beneficial. Identity politics, which emphasizes the unique
concerns of different communities and demographic groups, shows how
historical inequities have been distributed across different races,
genders, religions, abilities, and sexualities. In doing so, it allows
us to better understand how to critique and reform the systems that
replicate those inequities. It reveals how the foreclosure crisis disproportionately hurt black home owners, how health issues manifest differently across populations, and how various forms of “hidden taxes”
penalize women in professional life. To ignore identity is to ignore
injustice. Yet there are risks to viewing the world through the prism of
identity. If people are defined by their demographic characteristics,
they can be reduced to those
characteristics in a way that obscures differences within groups. If
“identity” becomes synonymous with “perspective,” dissenting members
within the identity group risk having their viewpoints erased and their
humanity diminished. And when used cynically, as a political weapon, a
simplistic view of identity can allow people of a particular political
faction to wrongly imply that they speak for all members of their racial
or gender group. Kamala Harris is black. She is a lot
of other things, too: a person of South Asian descent, a woman, a former
prosecutor and state Attorney General, a sitting Senator, and,
according to Barack Obama, “the best looking attorney general in the country.”
(I am your sister in side-eye, Michelle.) Out of nearly 2,000 senators
in the country’s history, Harris is one of only ten black Americans and
two black women to have held the position. Her personal characteristics
and political accomplishments, together with the intelligence and
tenacity that propelled her to the Senate, have made her a highly
visible prospect for the 2020 presidential race. Already, influential
Democrats have shown a strong interest in Harris, with prominent former Clinton donors meeting privately with Harris in the Hamptons. The San Francisco Chronicle called her the Democrats’ “Great Blue Hope,” and a Guardian writer suggested that the combination of Harris’s race and her centrist platform “could be the party’s solution to its identity crisis.”But certain parts of Kamala Harris’s political résumé have led to skepticism from the left. As California’s Attorney General, with responsibilities for overseeing the second largest prison population in the country, Harris’s professional obligation to put people behind bars was seen as being
in direct tension with the goals of Black Lives Matter, perhaps the
most prominent progressive movement of our time. Harris touted a
reform-minded “smart on crime”
approach in her prosecutorial role, one that encouraged education and
reentry programs for ex-offenders, and in the Senate, she has co-sponsored legislation to improve prison conditions for women. Yet she has also come under heavy criticism from activists for, among other things: defending the state against court orders to reduce its prison population, declining to take a public stand on sentencing reform proposals, attempting to block a court decision requiring the state to provide a transgender inmate with gender reassignment surgery, opposing a measure to require independent inquiries into police uses of force, and obstructing efforts by federal judges to hold California prosecutors accountable for an “epidemic” of misconduct. Harris has been a zealous prosecutor (at times, she said, she has been “as close to a vigilante as you can get”), and certain of her policies—like bringing criminal charges
against parents whose children miss school—conflict with the efforts of
groups like BLM to reduce the reach of the criminal justice system into
people’s lives.Harris has also drawn scrutiny over the crimes she wasn’t tough
on. While serving as Attorney General of California, Harris failed to
prosecute now-Treasury Secretary Steven “Foreclosure King” Mnuchin after
his OneWest Bank engaged in a notoriously aggressive pattern of home
foreclosures. Under Mnuchin, OneWest was a “foreclosure machine” that did everything it could to seize people’s houses, inflicting misery
on homeowners while failing to properly review foreclosure documents.
Harris’s consumer law division found that OneWest had engaged in “widespread misconduct” in its treatment of borrowers; the investigators urged Harris to “conduct
a full investigation of a national bank’s misconduct and provide a
public accounting of what happened.” Instead, Harris closed the case,
not even pursuing the compromise measure of a civil penalty. As David
Dayen writes, this “watered-down
version of public accountability was seen as the best possible outcome,
and Harris didn’t even go for that.” In failing to hold the bank
accountable, Dayen emphasizes, Harris was far from alone among state law
enforcement officials. Harris was, however, the only Democratic
senatorial candidate to whom Steven Mnuchin felt compelled to give a campaign donation.

Harris?

She's done nothing to qualify as president.

The corporations think we'll ride the bi-racial pony like it's 2008.

I doubt it.

And Harris' background with the prison industrial complex will hurt her a great deal with the African-American community.

Without an income + often with children to support, Mosul’s war widows are among most vulnerable displaced in #Iraq: trib.al/cQDiQ4k

1 reply99 retweets87 likes

Areas of Iraq will produce birth defects for decades due to the weapons
used there. (Used there by foreign forces -- the US-led coalition.)

Humanitarian includes medical and the US has bombed hospitals throughout
the war as has the Iraqi government. In addition, doctors have been
repeatedly targeted and threatened leading to many of them fleeing the
country.

The education system is as frayed as everything else from the war. In
the next 20 years, Iraq needs to build at least 20,000 schools as a
result of many things including (a) the destruction of schools from
bombings and (b) 'aid' that resulted in faulty construction.